Old School Learning Tools

1. Articulate Studio ‘09. Hands down, the best eLearning toolset on the market  How about that for a completely unbiased opinion from the QA Manager for 3 out of the 4 tools in the suite?  Honestly, I do think it is the best eLearning toolset on the market or I wouldn’t work at Articulate.  We offer great support, and make products that are so easy to learn even your grandma could use them.
2. Wordpress. It is impossible to ignore what blogs have done for eLearning, and how can my list be complete without including the BEST Blogging software.  Wordpress.
3. Twitter. This choice might turn some heads…you might be thinking, how does constant updates from Ashton Kutcher and Shaq facilitate learning?  Good question…it depends on how you use Twitter.  If you only follow the tweeps like Shaq or Ashton Kutcher you probably aren’t going to gain much from it, and you probably don’t have a whole lot of friends (Ok, I admit it, I follow Shaq).  However, if you use Twitter to connect, share, and ask advice from other professionals in your industry it can be an invaluable tool.  Find a blog that you like, and subscribe to his/her Twitter feed, you will be smarter for it.
4. Screenr.  Screenr is a tool for creating instant screencasts for Twitter.  Although this is a very new tool, it is easy to see the impact this is going to have on people making software demos and screencasts.  Screenr has eliminated the barriers to entry for anyone looking to create demos and screencasts.
   
5. Wikipedia. Originally I was going to list this as Wiki’s in general, but then figured I should probably suggest a specific vendor.  Problem is I don’t know enough about the different Wiki vendors to say which one is the best.  I don’t really think I need to explain this selection, it kinda speaks for itself.
   
6. Articulate Online. Another tool from the great guys at Articulate.  I know listing two products from the same company (or 3 I guess, technically) is a no-no, but this had to make my list.  The reason…Articulate Online has made distributing and tracking eLearning training easy.  One problem with traditional Learning Management Systems is that it is often difficult to deploy content to them, and then distribute content once it is on the LMS.  Articulate Online has changed that with one click publishing and easy deployment links.
7. Moodle.  Yes, Moodle, the Open Source LMS.  Why does this make my list…so many people are using it to distribute and track training.  It is free and reasonably good, which means it works for a lot of people.
   
8. Google Search. I am reading an eBook on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), because it came free with the purchase of my Wordpress theme, and in the book it mentions that 90-98% of Google’s revenue comes from ad-words placed on Google’s site.  So why does that matter?  Well, Google stops making boat loads of cash if people stop using their search, and people will stop using their search if they stop finding what they are looking for.  So cool, now you get the Google business model, but what hell does this have to do with learning and being a good learning tool?  Simple, it allows you to easily and quickly find the information you are looking for.  My dog @winstonpotacho has recently been diagnosed with an elevated lymphocyte count, and the only reason I know what the implications are of a high lymphocyte count is that I was able to find the information by googling for it.  I now know just as much about leukemia in dogs as just about anyone.  In the time before Google I would have no idea what it meant to have an elevated lymphocyte count.  On the positive side of not knowing though, I probably would have slept more than 4 hours a night the last 2 weeks.

Like my list?  Don’t like my list?  Want to submit your own list?  You should let the Center for Learning and Performance technologies know here.

Good news for everyone looking for a solution that allows them to charge users for access to their Articulate Online account…it is now possible.  With the release of the Articulate Online API it became possible to integrate Articulate Online with 3rd party eCommerce solutions such as PayPal.  Over the weekend I built a working example using PHP to integrate an Articulate Online account with PayPal, and I give away the code to do it for FREE!!!

For a detailed explanation of how I did it, and to get the sample code, check out this page that I have created that explains it:
http://www.mozealous.com/?page_id=256 

Questions or comments are welcome.  If you decide to use the code let me know, I am excited to hear if anyone other than me ends up using it.

To see the example in action, check out my Content for Sale section.

Added another app to the list of AO API Samples over the weekend.  It dynamically lists all the documents on your AO account and displays a cool little thumbnail of the first slide of each presentation.

For more info and get the code check here:
http://www.mozealous.com/?page_id=246

To see the app in action, check here:
http://www.mozealous.com/samples/listdocs/listdocuments1.php
Note: Sometimes the thumbnails don’t show on first load.  Try refreshing if they don’t display at first until I can get that debugged.

Based on a request I have heard from time to time, I have built another PHP web app that connects to the AO API and will export all the users on a specified account to a CSV file.  More info can be found here:
http://www.mozealous.com/?page_id=232

Added a new section to Mozealous.com this weekend… AO API Samples.  We recently released the AO API which opens up a whole new realm of possibilities of what you can do with Articulate Online.  For example, maybe you want to integrate your Articulate Online account with paypal so that customers can pay you to view your eLearning content, or maybe you want to automatically log users in from your site to Articulate Online.  All these things are now possible with the AO API.

Anyway, in the AO API section of mozealous.com I am going to be posting some examples of applications I have built that use the AO API.  My first application was a “Self-Registration” web-app that allows you to have users manually register themselves on your Articulate Online account.  Well, if you are interested, find out more at the link below:

http://www.mozealous.com/?page_id=211

Good news! We just released an update to Articulate Online that not only addresses Flash Player 10 issues but also adds support for Safari and Chrome browsers for Administrators and Publishers.

By adding support for Safari we now allow Admins/Publishers to administer their account on an iPhone! So now you can add users and manage permissions while on the road.

Hopefully Apple/Adobe will soon add Flash support on the iphone so users can view content as well.

Last evening we rolled out a significant update to Articulate Online that contains many new improvements.

Not that Articulate Online has ever been slow to respond, but a big portion of this release was targeted toward improving the performance and speed of the site. As Articualte Online’s user base continues to scale, we wanted to get out this release to ensure that Articulate Online would continue to perform optimally as our user base grew.

So if you are browsing around Articulate Online today, you might notice that the site is a little faster.

Other features we added in this release:

• Ability to make content private by default (availible under Settings tab>Other Settings)
• Removed ability to see attempt detail report in the user portal when history reports are turned off
• A boat load of bug fixes

For more detailed info on the bug fixes see the Articulate Online 1.5 release notes.

We just added a significant new feature to Articulate Online.

Since the release of Articulate Online back in January, one of the suggestions that we have heard time and time again from customers is that they wanted a “User Portal” in Articulate Online. To show you that we are listening, today we added a User Portal to Articulate Online!

Question: What is a “User Portal”?

Answer: The Articulate Online “User Portal” is a place where your private users can securely login to a personalized training site to view and access all content items that administrators or publishers have assigned to them.

When we originally designed Articulate Online we didn’t include a “User Portal” because we wanted to focus on creating a platform for easily hosting training content that could then be incorporated in existing websites, blogs, or linked to in emails sent to users. I think we did a pretty great job on this front.

However, shortly after release of Articulate Online in January we started to get requests from customers who also wanted a “User Portal” added to Articulate Online as another means of distributing their training. They wanted a place where users could login, view a list of content they are assigned to view and be able to view the content.

Question: So what does the “User Portal” include?

Answer: By enabling the “User Portal” in Articulate Online, you have the option of allowing your users to do the following in the “User Portal”:

• Show a list of all content items the users is given permission to view
• Show user history reports
• Enable users to print the History report (a list of all items viewed) or Attempt Detail report (a print out of the specific attempt at a quiz), which can be used as a completion certificate
• Manage their e-mail address and password settings in the “User Portal”
• Give your users a customized message in the “User Portal”

Question: Cool, so what is this going to cost me?

Answer: Nothing! Great part about it is that all of our existing plans will be able to enable the “User Portal” in Articulate Online, so it won’t cost you a thing.

So that’s it. I hope you guys like the “Users Portal” and thanks for reading my blog.

For more information on the User Portal visit this Knowledge Base article.

Want to know why Articulate Online was designed the way it was?

Much of Articulate Online’s design actually came from what we found users didn’t like about their current learning management systems.

Check out this presentation that explains the top 6 complaints we heard about traditional Learning Management Systems, and how we attempted to address those complaints in Articulate Online:

Articulate Online Demo (19:41)

A question came up this morning…

Here is the scenario (from large manufacturing company, utility, and hotel chain):

Our users do not have company assigned email addresses or a dedicated
PC. They share a PC in a break room, front desk, or shared kiosk environment. It
is in this type of venue that they take their mandatory e-learning courses and would then subsequently take their quizzes to ensure compliance on company wide matters (diversity training, protection of company assets, corporate ethics policies).

The suggestion has been to use employee id or badge number as the unique log-in. The challenge for us would be how to get the password to the private user if the content is private and email is not provided to distribute that. Also, in a shared environment, there would be problems with cookies for guestbook and perhaps also for would you like to resume where you left off from the course? So, we would need to look at a workaround option for that (Shared computer option so as not to use cookies?).

Question: So given the above environment, how can you track your users in Articulate Online, if they don’t have an email address and only use a shared computer?

Answer: What you could do is create your user accounts as if they had email addresses like this:

[userid]@[somemadeupdomain]

The users wouldn’t actually get any e-mail here. (It’s not a real domain anyways.) They just are using a format that the system requires so it looks like a valid e-mail address.

So if I’m a employee at ACME and my id is: 343219, and Jennifer works with me and her id is: 974311, we would log in as:

343219@acmetraining.com

974311@acmetraining.com

You could create your users by using the bulk upload feature in Articulate Online, which would allow you to specify a password for the user, and wouldn’t send any emails to the bogus email addresses. You would just need to get your users that password.

Then, just make any content private that you want to track user progress for. This will avoid any problems that might arise from relying on capturing Guestbook data in a public environment.

You will now be able to track your users progress in Articulate Online even though they don’t have an email address.